Friday, August 21, 2009

Chatting on the air

Thanks to everyone who tuned in to the Cinder Bridge interview on KXCI this Wednesday.

The whole thing went off much more smoothly than I expected. In general, I am not particularly good at coming up with witty responses in high-pressure situations. If I can get through one of these things without mispronouncing my own name, I consider it a success.

But Wednesday's Live at 5 wasn't a high-pressure situation at all. Instead of firing a succession of questions in our general direction, DJ Cathy Rivers just ... talked with us. It felt like we were simply continuing the conversation we'd started before the show, only now there were other people listening.

We also found out, before we went live, that Cathy Rivers' mother has ME/CFS. So she was more than happy to give some discussion time to "Everybody Knows About Me," our song about living with the disease.

The only thing I'd do differently, if I had it to do over again, would be to emphasize the most serious physical symptoms of ME/CFS -- for instance, the fact that people who have it tend to die earlier. Cathy Rivers said something about how sufferers have low cortisol, which makes it impossible for them to cope with stress. I riffed on that for a while. Now I'm hoping that listeners didn't take what I said the wrong way, thinking stress causes ME/CFS instead of the other way around.

For the record, listeners, stress doesn't cause ME/CFS. The disease is in no way, shape, or form psychological.

Other than that, everything went swimmingly. I can't wait for us to do it again. And I hope you enjoyed hearing us babble as much as we enjoyed babbling.

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